Bill Bradley

Party Animals

It was a presidential-wannabe kind of weekend in Los Angeles. Gray Davis, enshrined as the putative Comeback Kid of the 2002 elections at the annual California Democratic Party convention at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, fashioned himself after actor Michael Douglas in The American President. ”Your 15 minutes are up,“ he......

Hot on the Trail

Photo by Ted Soqui Dick Riordan is not in Kansas anymore. The last scheduled leg of his episodic “Tough Enough” bus tour of California, a two-day swing through Northern California and the Central Valley, was supposed to be a cakewalk through friendly territory. Replete with a photo-op stop at the......

A Fading Gray

As we enter the election year, we have a major paradox. Although there are promising new developments on the energy front, Gray Davis is shockingly weak in popularity compared to other major elected officials since the terrorist attacks of September 11 -- he‘s among the few in the country who......

Where to Now?

Phase One of the Terror War, the war against the al Qaeda--harboring Taliban regime of Afghanistan, has been a triumph of American arms. Kabul, the Afghan capital, fell on Veterans Day, and Kandahar, the Taliban spiritual center, fell on December 7, the 60th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. (”Just coincidence,“ says......

The Dozen Rip-offs

No blackouts are in store this holiday season. Trees and displays will blaze forth in a reaffirmation of Americana. Indeed, the state government has bought so much power that at times it sells it off at a steep loss. And wholesale prices are much lower than they were. Yet the......

Enron’s End

The Fall of the House of Enron would be enormous news were it not for the Terror War. The company’s pending acquisition by another big energy firm, Dynegy, for a mere fraction of its onetime value, is as much a rescue as it is a merger. It’s also a fall......

See Riordan Run

Former California Governor Jerry Brown, who invented Gray Davis, has a great saying about politics: “A little vagueness goes a long way in this business.” That‘s something that former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, the latest aspirant for the state’s highest office, seems to have taken very much to heart......

Unsteady War-Footing

The lack of U.S. readiness for a war on terrorism is underscored by reading the nation‘s principal military strategy document, the Quadrennial Defense Review. It’s true, The New York Times praised it as ”strikingly prescient“ in identifying terrorism as the major threat to the United States, but the accolade is......

The Heat Is On

You can’t accuse Governor Gray Davis of losing focus. When the state suffered rolling blackouts, he was determined to rescue financially ailing Southern California Edison. For the good of California, he said. The rolling blackouts eventually stopped, but not Davis, who remained committed to sending billions to the private utility......

What Kind of War?

The Terror War is upon us. Since no American government would fail to forcefully answer the massacre by foreign agents of nearly 6,000 people in broad daylight on American soil, the realistic political questions concern the nature of the war ahead. The cooler heads in the Bush administration say the......